


all I want (is nothing more)

by merrygoaround



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Idk what I’m doing, and his unfairly tragic life, but here’s a sad story about Peter Parker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 21:35:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14679947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrygoaround/pseuds/merrygoaround
Summary: Peter is five years old when he’s dropped off at May and Ben’s apartment.He’s fifteen when he wonders if he’s already broken, right down the middle, and he just didn’t feel it.





	all I want (is nothing more)

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta’d (Read: probably sloppy). read at your own risk. ;) 
> 
>  
> 
> wrote this a few days ago when I was in a mood.  
> Snippets of Peter as he grows to where we see him introduced in Civil War. Because this poor boy has lost almost everything time and again, and I doubt he was all sunshine and rainbows up to him going to Germany. Spider-Boy goes through a lot. This is my attempt at a sort of disassociated look at his losses and fears. This is probably overdone, but I digress.

Peter is five years old when his mom and dad drop him off at Ben and May’s tiny apartment. Aunt May is a new name in his head that belongs to a new face, and Uncle Ben is only familiar from the pictures Peter has seen at his house. He looks older now, Peter thinks. He looks like Dad. 

He stands on the stained linoleum of an unfamiliar kitchen, looking at the cookies on the counter and wondering if any of the four adults will notice if he grabs one.  
Aunt May said she made them for him. Now she isn’t saying anything, and her eyebrows are drawn together in a way that makes her face look sharp.  
Peter’s dad is saying something in the voice he uses at night sometimes, when Peter sneaks up and sees him and mom looking over lots of words printed onto lots of papers on their kitchen table.

Peter’s mom hugs him goodbye and his dad tells him to be good, and then the door is closing behind them and Peter looks again to the counter.  
Aunt May asks him if he wants a cookie, and he tells her no. 

Peter is five years old when his uncle comes home from work with red eyes and broken words. It is Aunt May who has to tell him that his mom and dad won’t be coming back.  
“They promised.” He tells her plaintively. Aunt May starts crying then too. Peter looks at the door and decides he doesn’t believe her. 

————

 

Peter is six when his uncle hugs him tight, like he had at the funeral, and tells him that the adoption papers went through. He asks if Peter wants to celebrate. Aunt May has made cookies.  
Peter tells them no. 

May and Ben help him put up a Harry Potter poster up on his wall and take him shopping for new bed sheets and tell him that he gets to keep this bedroom as his own now. 

Peter hasn’t seen his old bedroom in months. No one took him back home again. He doesn’t remember what his mom’s hair smelled like when she hugged him goodnight. He cries himself to sleep every Sunday night for two months. They told him they would be back on a Sunday, and it takes eight of them before he starts to believe what Aunt May told him.  
They aren’t coming to take him home. 

————

 

Peter is eight when he excitedly tells Uncle Ben about the Stark Expo that is coming to Queens. He pours out his blue piggy bank onto the kitchen table and carefully counts every coin. He doesn’t have enough, not nearly, but Aunt May says that his birthday isn’t too far away. Maybe he’ll be surprised. 

He gets the tickets two weeks before he turns nine. The exposition is that weekend. He tells Ned about it at school on Monday. Ned says he would die to go, but Peter tells him then he wouldn’t even get to see any of the cool stuff.

Peter is eight when he sees, through the slits in his plastic Iron Man mask, a suit of armor aim its repulser at him. He feels a swoop of fear, but he lifts his arm to match the gesture. Surely this is one of the displays, he thinks.  
It isn’t. 

The suit explodes before him. Someone says something that is drowned out by a ringing in his ears, and then Aunt May is crying next to him. She hugs him like he’s about to blow away, and he can smell her strawberry conditioner in her hair where it’s pressed on his cheek. 

Someone took off his mask. He feels scared without it. Maybe he was about to be hurt, he thinks. He wonders what Ned will say about this. 

———

 

Peter is twelve when he first gets shoved into a locker in the halls of his middle school. He doesn’t even know his harasser’s name, but apparently that doesn’t matter. They want his lunch money. Peter doesn’t have any; Aunt May always makes his for him, and he always makes sure he eats it or, on the turkey meatloaf days, dumps it out so it looks like he did. She works so hard on his and Ben’s every morning. It makes her happy. 

The bully doesn’t care. He tells Peter as much with his small, meaty fist. Peter can see the kid they usually pick on out of the corner of his eye. He’s smaller and looks more scared. Maybe being beat up in front of a locker is the worst thing to happen to that kid, Peter thinks.  
He wishes, quietly and in the back of his head, that it was the worst thing that had happened to him. 

The next week he comes home with a split lip and a bruised cheek for the third time, and Ben teaches him how to throw a punch. May gently tells him it’s always okay to stand up for himself. Peter’s heart twists a little when he remembers his mom telling him the same thing when he was scared to go to kindergarten.  
He can’t remember what her voice sounded like, but he can hear May’s, so he hugs her tight instead.  
“I know.” He tells her. He thinks he does. 

 

——-

 

Peter is fourteen years old when he goes on a field trip he’s been geeking out about for weeks. Ned elbows him through first period all day, both of them over excited about what’s to come. 

He comes home an aching mess, his vision blurring in and out until he isn’t even sure if he’s conscious. When he wakes up the next day he bends his metal bed frame nearly in half, and snaps the lid off the toilet when he goes to open it.

Two weeks later he stops a mugging in an alley two streets down from their apartment. He wants to tell May and Ben, wants them to be proud. But mostly he wants to ask them what to do. He’s seen the news, he knows what this might mean.  
He gets home and washes the blood off his knuckles and wonders what Ben would think of his right hook.  
He never tells either of them.  
He doesn’t tell anyone. 

———

 

Peter is fifteen years old when he watches Ben shot twice in the chest. His feet are rooted to the wet cement, the takeout Ben had asked him to carry slapping onto the ground. He doesn’t move when the lady behind them screams, or when his ears pick up the sound of a phone from the end of the street, dialing 911. 

Ben's eyes are staring, up and up and up, reflecting the lights of the windows around them. There are no stars to see.  
Peter’s vision blurs in and out and his knees hit the ground next to a still warm body. All he can see is the red. 

They tell him Ben was dead before he hit the ground. They tell him it was quick and painless.

For who? Peter wonders. 

He sees the anguish in every defeated line of May’s body. He sees the blood stained under his fingernails, no matter how many times he scrubs to get it out.  
It does not feel painless. 

Peter wears Ben’s jacket to bed every night for the first two weeks after the shooting. During the third one, he goes out and buys a blue and red hoodie with a mask, and he dons a makeshift suit for the first time. 

The next week he tells a lady he stops from walking into traffic to call him Spider-Man. His voice only cracks a little.  
And if Peter spends the first few weeks of this new double life up and down a street that had been recently stained with blood, nobody's the wiser.

———

 

He couldn’t save his mom or dad. He could’ve saved Uncle Ben, he tells himself every night, but he didn’t. The only thing he has left now is Aunt May, and with every purse snatcher or would be mugger he stops, he thinks of her eyes the first time she went out after Ben had died.  
“Peter, will you come with me?” She had asked. She was afraid to go out alone.  
He won’t let her get hurt. He can’t let her get hurt.  
He could’ve stopped Ben from getting hurt. 

———

Peter is fifteen and he can still remember the way his Uncle's eyes crinkled when he laughed at May’s singing or Peter’s puns. He can’t remember the smell of his mother’s perfume but he can remember her voice, and he remembers how he saw his dad in Ben's eyes sometimes. 

He is so afraid that he will forget them all that his lungs seize for a moment, and his heart twists like it wants to come undone in his chest. He sometimes wishes it would. 

———-

 

He stops a bus with his bare hands and helps a little girl in it find her sobbing mother. He watches from a rooftop as they reunite with her dad, and his heart twists some more. He’s used to the feeling now. 

He sits on the rooftop until the sun sets over the buildings in front of him. Peter wonders how many people the world can strip away from him before he breaks. 

When he sneaks home that night he finds that his arms are streaked with blood from a cut on his hand. It’s been hours since he stopped the bus. He never even noticed. 

He wonders if maybe he already has broken, cracked down the middle, and he just didn’t feel it.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a comment if you want, maybe let me know how this looks?  
> I haven’t posted a fanfic since I was a 12 year old obsessed with Harry Potter.


End file.
